Ruffly Speaking

frowned? A skulker, a carpet soiler, a submissive urinator, or, worse, a fear-biter or even a fight-starter! I mean, you try to educate kids, teach them the difference between right and wrong, but when they’re caught in the throes of adolescence? When the hormones are raging and their judgment’s shot? Well, it’s not easy. In fact, it’s nerve-wracking. You can absolutely never tell what they might bring home next.
     

9
     
     Rita’s old dachshund, Groucho, was a sweet, cooperative little guy who provided her with a myriad of seasonal excuses to avoid dog walking. Summer was too hot for Groucho. Winter was too cold. Spring was wet. Autumn was unpredictable. Toward the end of Groucho’s life, he actually became too feeble to enjoy an outing and thus offered Rita her first legitimate reason never to take him for more than a one-block bathroom trip.
    Her present dog, Willie, however, is an energetic young Scottie who needs vigorous daily exercise. More to the point, Willie is simply not the kind of individual who would passively and cooperatively submit to being used as an excuse. After all, he’s a Scottie. He’s also himself. Double whammy. If Rita showed any sign of enjoying their walks, he’d probably fall flat on the sidewalk and refuse to budge as soon as his paws hit concrete. As it is, the more ardently Rita tries to avoid dog walking, the more intensely Willie revels in it. In fact, what Willie loves isn’t so much walking as winning. Willie: short for Willful.
    What’s going to save Rita from ruining Willie’s walks by learning to love them is her irrational insistence on dressing up whenever she leaves the house. When you walk a beautiful dog, what you wear doesn’t matter be-cause anyone worth meeting is going to look at your dog, not at you. Rita disagrees and refuses to compromise even in the small matter of shoes. This is Cambridge, postfeminist now, not China a hundred years ago, but at siy-thirty or so on Monday evening when Rita and Willie rounded the corner from Concord and trotted down Appleton, she wore a white linen suit and a pair of what she tells me are called spectator pumps. To walk a dog. But Rita looked great, and so did the recently trimmed Willie.
    Grooming, though, is an entirely superficial process that has no impact on character, especially what’s called “real terrier character.” Willie’s bushy eyebrows, correctly combed forward, failed to hide the fire in his blackhearted eyes. Am I getting the message across? Let me warn you: Willie doesn’t just bark. Well, I’ll hedge. Willie ponders biting. He mulls it over. He imagines it. He savors the prospect. He plans. To the best of my knowledge, however, he has not translated his impulses into action since he’s lived with Rita. What he does is eye people’s ankles and, given the opportunity, fly at them, too. For some reason or another, perhaps the scent of Rowdy or maybe even the scent of my own nonspectating soul, Willie really goes for mine.
    When Rita and Willie reached our driveway, I’d finished tidying up the tiny bed of impatiens next to the fence and was thinking how much prettier delphiniums would look there instead and wondering when Leah would get home. At the sight of me, Willie began his inevitable growling and barking, and Rita made her usual futile attempts to restrain him and to get him to keep quiet while she also fished around trying to turn off her hearing aids.
    “I’ll take him,” I bellowed over the din. I reached for his leash, but Rita didn’t trust me.
    “I can cure him of that, you know,” I shouted to her. “He has the right to learn how to be a good dog.”
    Rita had finally located the dials on her aids and hence missed most of what I said. “Yes, he really is a good dog,” she replied happily.
    That horrible stereotype of the comical old deaf lady who keeps making a laughingstock of herself?And all because of Willie. Well, not because of Willie himself— key distinction—but because of his rotten but eminently eradicable behavior. Yes, eradicable. How? Lots of ways, of course, but I’ll confess that what danced through my head was a sharp vision of the Yap Zapper in my own skilled hands. Why? Because no one makes a fool of Rita, not if I can help it.
    As usual, it didn’t take Willie long to settle into a silent but eager contemplation of my high-top Reeboks. Then Leah appeared—and not alone, either—and, black eyes blazing, Willie started up again. So, in her own